Changing career can feel beyond frustrating, particualry because many of us start by doing an awful lot of googling and overthinking about it, convincing ourselves that we’ll have a lightbulb moment.
The potential impact on your financial security and your identity, plus the idea of all of that “sunk cost” (the effort you’ve put into building a career in one area, only to move on), can all feel like very good reasons for remaining exactly where you are, in an unfulfilling role.
On top of those, a nagging Inner Saboteur might well be telling you that you’ll fail and look stupid, and it’s too late to change because you can’t learn new skills in your 30s, 40s and 50s in the way that you could when you were younger.
The bottom line is that primitive part of our brains is wired to be hyper alert to threats to our safety and survival and it sees career change as one of the biggest threats of all.
All of this sounds rather gloomy. But despite all of those challenges, people do change career. It might take time and a lot of energy, but it really is possible.
To manage your primitive brain that’s so worried about you failing and becoming penniless, what makes change possible is de-risking it.
By talking to people who do what you’re interested in and running small experiments, you can take a “test and learn” approach while you’re in your existing role. Small experiments include things like doing a short course, shadowing someone, helping with a project in another part of your existing organisation, running a side project or volunteering,
Good conversations and mini experiments, allow you to drop potentially false assumptions and gain evidence about things like any gaps in your skills and how to gain them; what the financial rewards really are; if the people feel like your sort of tribe; and whether you actually do enjoy doing the sort of work you’ve thought of for a while now.
Taking action also means you build a network of people who you meet along the way. Yes, some people will be too busy to speak to you, but others might be surprisingly open if you ask them for 20 minutes of their time to ask focused questions. Not only that but they’ll most likely give you another contact to speak to, as well.
Career change involves you being vulnerable, patient, and persistent as you go through it. But if you’re willing to put the effort in, it absolutely is possible.
Many thanks to Mohamed Hassan for the image https://pixabay.com/users/mohamed_hassan-5229782/
